To recap: An Article Processing Charge is a fee that is charged to authors to make their articles open access in either a fully open access journal (Gold OA) or in a hybrid journal. It is often referred to as the "author pays" model, but generally, it is the author's employer or funding body that ends up paying the APC.
How much are APCs? In a small study of open access articles published in a wide variety of journals by forced migration authors, I found that hybrid OA APCs were significantly higher than APCs for publishing in gold OA journals: an average of $2995/median of $3000 for the former versus an average of $1646/median of $1595 for the latter. This is consistent with findings by other studies (see, e.g., Pinfield et al., 2017). I have also monitored the costs of hybrid OA fees charged by 15 forced migration-specific journals over the years. (See this table.) For a majority, APCs have increased steadily since 2017. In 2022, the average APC for this set of titles was $3350, up from $3169 in 2020.
The consequences of this shift from a "pay-to-read" model to a "pay-to-publish" model are summarized in this blog post:
"The APC model represents a lateral move in terms of access, greatly improving access for readers but shifting the inequity in the system onto authors. It allows everyone to read the work of others, but limits the ability to publish one’s own work to those with sufficient funds to cover the costs of doing so. This greatly disadvantages authors from less-wealthy regions of the world, along with unfunded researchers, and entire fields without the significant funding structures found in some of the sciences that are largely driving the move to APC models."
The proliferation of the APC business model has been particularly challenging for authors in the Global South. As these South Africa-based researchers note, "The cost of a PlosOne article is 20% of the cost of a Masters student’s scholarship. So the choice is 'do I give a Masters student a scholarship, or publish more in open access journals?'" A study of publication in emergency medicine and critical care journals found that "[w]hen Purchasing Power Parity was considered, compared to United States authors, article process charges were shown to be 2.24 times more expensive for South African authors, 1.75 times more for Chinese authors, 2.28 times more for Turkish authors and 1.56 times more for Brazilian authors."
What about fee waivers for authors based in low- or middle-income countries? This study found that most of the large journal publishers do have some kind of waiver policy in place, but this applies principally to APCs for Gold OA journals; hybrid journals are generally excluded. The reasoning is that authors with limited financial means can simply publish their articles in a subscription-based journal in the usual way at no cost, and then use the Green route to make their article OA.
Even when journals offer waiver policies, as this article explains, "very often, [researchers in Africa] are not eligible for waivers, because they are based in a country with high enough per capita income, even though such high per capita income may not reflect in the extent to which the country’s government supports researchers. In other instances, researchers from low- and middle-income countries may be ineligible for waivers because they have a named high-income country coauthor on their manuscript, even when they have received little or no financial support through such a coauthor... ."
Publication fees for hybrid OA journals are increasingly being folded into so-called "read-and-publish agreements," whereby contracts negotiated between libraries and publishers end up covering both subscriptions and APCs. However, these agreements have largely been undertaken by institutions based in Western Europe and North America. As such, in the view of this author, they continue to perpetuate "a two-tier system of scholarly publishing based on access to funds needed to meet publishing charges."
While other routes to open access exist (i.e., publishing in OA journals that do not charge APCs, depositing eprints of articles in institutional repositories, etc.), the reality is that financial hurdles in the form of publication fees are limiting the ability of certain researchers to contribute to the global knowledge base. The risk remains that valuable research goes unpublished and unseen when these financial hurdles cannot be overcome.